Bloodstained Kings

No one in "Bloodstained Kings" is actually in jail, but perhaps they should be-the stench of lies and mendacity suffuse the New Orleans setting. It's like "Road Warrior" as envisioned by Tennessee Williams. Tim Willocks' intense second novel leaves you drained and breathless, with desperate characters and tableaux ricocheting inside your head. Willocks' first book, "Green River Rising," was an extraordinarily wrenching thriller drenched in blood and heat and sex and philosophy, and his second is in the same vein. That tale took us inside the claustrophobic confines of an experimental prison; this one seems set inside the feverish, violent minds of the people who populate it.The basic plot of "Bloodstained Kings" is pretty straightforward: Two ruined lives are brought together by a voice from, apparently, beyond the grave, when instructions left by a dying man jolt the novel's key characters out of stagnant existences and set in motion a series of implosions and explosions. We meet Lenna Parrilaud, a ruthless and rich businesswoman motivated only by hatred and malaise. Thirteen years ago, Parrilaud conspired to fake the death of her husband, who had performed several heinous acts against her, and has kept him drugged and helpless, in a secret barracks, ever since. Her world has been "a dark one, filled with malice and pain."And, as in "Green River Rising," Willocks gives us a flawed and reluctant hero, a psychiatrist with the unlikely name of Cicero Grimes. Grimes has spent the last six months "clinging to the driftwood of his own self-disgust on a far-flung beach of despair," filled with rage but hampered by "psychotic melancholia." The reason for his withdrawal: a life-or-death encounter with a corrupt, larger-than-life policeman named Clarence Jefferson, the same man who helped Parrilaud imprison her husband, "the bad man's Calvin, a philosopher-king of vileness." In an incident that Willocks explains inadequately, Grimes managed to kill Jefferson, or so he thought, and is stunned to receive! a to-be-opened-in-the-event-of-my-death letter from the dying cop. The letter asks Grimes to carry out a dangerous mission-namely, to disseminate a cache of blackmail evidence accumulated over a lifetime of power playing. Jefferson was "a man born for games, a Russian roulette addict, who forced others to play along with him and usually left their corpses in his wake. Now, from beyond the grave, his swollen corpse had spun the cylinder and placed the gun to Grimes's skull."There's an appealingly self-assured teenage girl, and Grimes' father (a WWII vet hankering for one last mission), and a lot of bad guys in suits and fatigues-and don't forget Parrilaud's seething husband moldering away in his hidden cell. There's blood, blood everywhere. Grimes "had not imagined that so much would have to be spilled or that he would be steeped in it so deep." We hadn't imagined it, either. A lot of souls are bared, teeth gritted, fists clenched. Willocks' characters, fa

The book started out as a great character-driven psychological study in human depravity and musings on the meaning of life. There was more than enough to hold my interest, until the chases and the shoot-outs started. Willocks should have relied more on the characters, and less on contrived plot turns and shoot-em-ups. Still, it's better than most fiction on the market today.

I read green river and I astounded by the special insights and psychological inadaquecies the author was able to convey. His special ability to narrate the subtle emotional traumas in his characters was real and very moving. As much as I was touched by his first book is as let down as i was with bloostained kings. Even though he dove into the deep end of the emotional pool i felt that the story was not held together and that character definition was absent. Willocks has awsome ability and I am sorry that to a certain extent it went unrealized in this book.

Wow!Willocks' latest work follows the characters introduced in his first novel, Bad City Blues, namely, Eugene Grimes, a pretty hardcore shrink with an interest in martial arts (based on Willocks, yes I think so).Kings is a dark tale of discovery and a search for the truth. Good guys race Bad guys to the buried treasure (a suitcase full of dirt on politicians gathered by the most sadistic and lawless lawman ever,Clarence Jefferson) A brilliantly constructed plot follows the different parties in the race and keeps you hanging on the edge of your seat, loving every page.Willocks' character development has come such a long way in three brilliant novel, Kings paints such a vivid picture of the South you become immersed in the story. Willocks lets us in on some of his most dark and foul demons in this book and some pages are hard to accept, but it's worth it's weight in gold. Readers of Tim's first two novels will keep this book in a glass case.The Tarantino of the litarary world? Yep.The greatest modern thiller author? definitely.